“Nabokov in America” Publication Party | Oakland

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Robert Roper to the store for the publication party of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita, on Tuesday, June 9th at 6:30 pm. Please join us as he discusses and signs his latest work of non-fiction.

The author of the immortal Lolita and Pale Fire, was born to an eminent Russian family, but Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, Nabokov was not only happiest here, but his best work flowed from his response to this exotic land.

Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer’s life with charm and insight- covering Nabokov’s critical friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, and his role at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his serial sojourns into the wilds of the West, accompanied by his wife, Vera, and their son, for over more than a decade. Nabokov covered more than 200,000 miles as he indulged his other passion: butterfly collecting. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov’s work: on two-lane highways and in late-’40s motels and cafes, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov’s seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov’s broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the mountain breezes and the miles logged, the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov’s most beloved books.

Robert Roper has won awards for his fiction and nonfiction alike. His most recent book, Fatal Mountaineer, won the 2002 Boardman-Tasker Prize given by London’s Royal Geographical Society. His journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and others. He teaches writing and film at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Baltimore and northern California.

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